Herein, related art is discussed to aid in understanding the invention. Related art labeled “prior art” is admitted prior art; related art not labeled “prior art” is not admitted prior art.
Due to ever increasing and changing demands for computer resources, computer systems are often reconfigured, e.g., rearranged or expanded. In complex server environments, changes to server configurations must be carefully planned. Some server administrators manually prepare documents that represent the current configuration and use these to plan changes. However, such documents take a lot of time to create, are prone to mistakes, can easily become out of date, and may be difficult to locate when they are needed to return to a previous configuration.
The problems in tracking configuration changes are even more complex when the configuration changes involve virtual machines. A virtual machine can be used in exactly the same manner as a physical computer, but it also allows for powerful models in which it is created for a limited duration to accomplish a specific task and is then discarded like a paper cup. In this model, traditional systems analysis runs into two problems: 1) the target system may not exist by the time analysis is complete; 2) the issues found in the target system may have been passed onto children that did not exist when analysis was initiated.